Identifying congestion in a network has been a long-term goal in the field of networking. Many schemes have been proposed to date for identifying and avoiding congested segments of a network. However, most of these schemes still cannot rapidly detect congestion. This is often because most of the proposed solutions require control plane processes to detect path changes and identify changes to path latencies. Accordingly, there is a need for forwarding elements with robust data plane path and latency trackers that can detect path and latency changes in real time at data line rates at which the forwarding elements forward data messages.